Philosophy Colloquium - Fri., Oct. 10. 2014

[Vicki Brett]

The next Philosophy Colloquium will be held Friday, October 10, 2014 at 3:30 p.m. in HH 373: Ishani Maitra<http://www.lsa.umich.edu/philosophy/people/faculty/ci.maitraishani_ci.detail>,
University of Michigan, "Lying, Acting and Asserting".

Details can be found at: https://uwaterloo.ca/philosophy/events

Ishani Maitra
University of Michigan
Lying, Acting and Asserting

There's a long history of supposing that lying to someone requires saying (or asserting) something with the intention of deceiving them. More recently, there's been a decisive move away from this tradition, in response to examples of what are called 'bald-faced lies'. In this paper, I argue that bald-faced lies aren't lies, because they're not assertions. I begin by arguing that lies must be assertions. Next, I briefly sketch a view of assertion according to which a constitutive rule of asserting is being responsive to evidence in a particular way. Then, focusing on two well-known examples of bald-faced lies, I argue that those speakers don't assert anything; rather, they do something more like what an actor does. My argument thus removes an important objection to intend-to-deceive conceptions of lying. But more importantly, it offers a different way of thinking about lying. Defenders of bald-faced lies sometimes describe them as attempts to 'go on the record' with something known to be false. I argue against this conception, and defend an alternate view according to which lying involves taking a kind of (epistemic) responsibility for the content of one's utterance.







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